Symbian Foundation Sites To Close

Following news earlier this month that Nokia is taking back control of Symbian platform development, the Symbian Foundation has now announced that its websites will shut down on December 17th. Source repositories will no longer be hosted online, and user-submitted content databases may be available later upon request. "We are working hard to make sure that most of the content accessible through web services (such as the source code, kits, wiki, bug database, reference documentation & Symbian Ideas) is available in some form, most likely on a DVD or USB hard drive upon request to the Symbian Foundation. Preparing this content will take some time, hence it will not be distributable before 31st January 2011. A charge may be levied for media and shipping.

Re:It's official

[Anonymous Coward]

Long live Qt. At least based on what I have seen so far. QtCreator, model/view classes and the signal/slot connections patterns beats the hell out of developing on Android using clunky XML layouts, adapters and intents.

Re:It's official

[fbjon]

To be fair, what mobile platforms aren't "one constantly evolving"?

Re:So how is Symbian free software?

[tepples]

From the summary:

the source code [...] is available in some form, most likely on a DVD

I don't see how this makes Symbian not free software. Anyone can buy a copy of the source code on DVD for $10 or so and host a mirror. Such was the Free Software Foundation's business model in the early days.

Re:Mobile: The Gathering

[johanw]

And considering market share the one is Symbian. doing better than all others. And as long as Android comes only in 2 form factors I both don't like (touch screen only and touch screen with retractable keyboard) I stick to Symbian which brings out devices without fingerprint-prone screens (aka touchscreen) and fixed keyboards like my E51 and E72.

Sad news

[Anonymous Coward]

Time to download the PDK whilst I still can, would love to see someone fork Symbian OS and develop some of the research projects e.g. X86, minimal ARM builds. Perhaps some of the ex-Symbian engineers will do this as a hobby project now that Nokia are sacking many of the OS developers.

On a purely technical basis Symbian is still light years ahead of Android, it's just Nokia's decision to run on slow hardware and have crappy apps, UI. If you don't believe me compare N97 and Samsun Omnia which share a common baseline/Symbian OS.

Re:It's official

[Anonymous Coward]

blahblahblah

More propaganda gobbldegook. Symbian lives and sells and has good hardware.

Re:So how is Symbian free software?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Ummm, a policy of distribution, on request, for no more than a reasonable cost recovery fee, is actually explicitly GPL compatible(and I'm not aware, offhand, of any reasonably common "free software" license that does specify http rather than fedex). Legally, a change from having a website to distributing dumps of the backups on request makes no difference at all.

De-facto, of course, seeing as web pages(along with things like torrents if you really have no bandwidth money and big files to move) are by far the most convenient and cheap means of distributing code and facilitating its open development, pulling the site down typically announces an intention to quietly move to a "legally open, in practice closed consortium that the unwashed can visit if they fill out a request in triplicate six months in advance" or (as is not wholly implausible with symbian) just take the project out back and shoot it. From a "free software" perspective, a move away from the overwhelmingly easiest way to run a project openly certainly doesn't scream "team player"; but it isn't a legally salient move.

Re:Mobile: The Gathering

[Plug]

Or, look at it this way: Symbian device sales were up 61% year-on-year in Q3 2010, and 320,000 people per day chose a Symbian smartphone in Q3 2010.

Market share isn't everything - look no further than Apple. The market as a whole is clearly growing - in Symbian's case, the lower hardware requirements mean the smartphone experience is being pushed down the market to what would previously have been considered "feature phones".

Pick the right tool for the right job. Symbian was designed from the word go to run on battery-powered devices. UNIX and Linux were not, and consequently power management is largely bolted on. Given the same battery, Symbian will run a phone for longer than iOS or Android. The tradeoff to this is that you must write your code in a very esoteric way. That is not what the "app console" market wants today, which is why Nokia brought Qt to Symbian.

Re:Mobile: The Gathering

[sznupi]

Growth in number of units shiped is biggest for Symbian. Everything else is deceiving when players have so wildly different installed bases.

Pundits in few atypical (but highly vocal) places few years ago, when smartphone market was sitting at around 15%, were making prophecies of explosive growth of smartphone segment - so that we should be at half by now. It's around 20% of total, maybe not even above as of yet.

Impressive growth percentages of smartphones don't mention the growth of the total mobile phone market. Also $20 phones. So called "feature phones" mostly (many with more capabilities than iPhone for most of the time...) - and while I can see efforts to redefine Symbian as "not really smartphone", it doesn't change how it will be widely used.

Daily (often bi-daily, for Androids, from what I can see...) recharging of phone is not so straightforward for a lot of people BTW.

Regarding developers - so, tell me, how many of those thousands apps are UIs for single web pages, single e-books and audiobooks or UIs for radio stations? Look at what is used on the desktop. There is something like "enough" here...